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The Ontario Progressive Conservatives had a stage-managed play all set to reveal their new leader to take on Kathleen Wynne on Saturday, and they botched it.
Doug Ford probably won. Maybe it was Christine Elliott. But probably Doug Ford. The party didn’t know when it would know.
They couldn’t be sure they’d counted the votes accurately. Four hours after they were supposed to be done, the poor volunteer chairman of the Tory leadership election committee, Hartley Lefton, admitted defeat.
“There’s a review underway of an allocation for a certain list of electors that needs to be resolved,” he told loyalists who’d paid to be there for the announcement, in a ballroom at a hotel in Markham. We don’t know how long it’s going to take, he said. We’ll tell you who the new leader is “as soon as practically possible.”
Then the coup de grace: “Unfortunately, we do not have access to the hall any longer,” Lefton had to say. “Members, I ask you to please go home to await the results.”
The Tories in the room booed. Just as they’d booed Progressive Conservative caucus chair Lisa Thompson half an hour before, when she went up to stall for time.
The balloons stayed in the net above the ballroom. The bugles stayed unblown. The sacred oils stayed unsmeared on any foreheads. The party hasn’t picked a champion. Ex-MPP Frank Klees called for the party executives to resign.
Voting concluded Friday and the results were so close between veteran Christine Elliott and insurgent Doug Ford that fine technicalities in the counting mattered. Specifically, a technicality that had escaped the leadership-campaign organizers until it suddenly became important: Some of the ballots didn’t indicate which riding the voter lives in.
The party uses a weighted voting system to pick its leader: Each constituency in Ontario is accorded 100 points, divided up according to the percentage of votes each candidate wins there.
If the difference between Elliott and Ford had been thousands of votes, transmogrified into hundreds of points through the riding-by-riding calculator machine, it wouldn’t have mattered. But the difference is not thousands of votes, it’s hundreds — with, it’s rumoured, Elliott ahead slightly in raw votes, Ford ahead slightly in the points calculation that matters under the rules.
(The other two candidates, Tanya Granic Allen and Caroline Mulroney, finished out of the running.)
The free-floating votes have postal codes attached to them, apparently, but some postal codes straddle riding boundaries. They’re not definitive about the voter’s residence.
It’s such a particularly awful mess because Ford, in the last days of the campaign last week, all but accused the party brass of trying to throw the race to Elliott.
It wasn’t subtle: “The leadership vote has been corrupted,” he wrote in an email blast to supporters. “The same group of insiders that oversaw rigged nominations over the past two years has made a two-tier system that favours their hand-picked elites over regular party members.”
A dozen MPPs backed Elliott. Two backed Ford.
The Progressive Conservatives desperately, desperately need unity after this. They said so from the stage, before all the badness went down.
Do not let small differences, which are inevitable in a leadership campaign, distract us, interim leader Vic Fedeli said early in the afternoon, when the train was still on the rails. He immediately repeated it for emphasis.
“Stay together. Stay united. Stay strong. Uniting is not something that simply happens to us. Uniting is something we do,” he said. He was pleased to be handing over the controls to the new leader. Good to go.
The party invited Jason Kenney, the former federal minister and now leader of Alberta’s provincial conservatives, to fire up the crowd. He reminded Ontario Tories what they, and conservatives across the country, agree on: they hate and distrust Premier Kathleen Wynne and the Liberals, they scorn Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (“Prime Minister Dressup,” Kenney called him, and threw in a joke about Trudeau’s gender-neutral language), and they will do anything to fight a carbon tax.
“We need you. All Canadians need you to turn this province around,” Kenney told them.
Maybe this will be a blip. The Tories have ticked up in the polls throughout the leadership race, occasioned by Patrick Brown’s abrupt resignation in a scandal over sexual misconduct. The leadership candidates attacked each other publicly, they stomped on Brown’s memory (and his mercurial decisions to pop into the leadership race and then leave it again). Members complained about the voting system.
The news in provincial politics for more than a month has been about Progressive Conservatives fighting among themselves, and it hasn’t hurt them.
But this party is supposed to be a government in waiting. Whatever the polls show, it’s not looking like one.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
Doug Ford probably won. Maybe it was Christine Elliott. But probably Doug Ford. The party didn’t know when it would know.
They couldn’t be sure they’d counted the votes accurately. Four hours after they were supposed to be done, the poor volunteer chairman of the Tory leadership election committee, Hartley Lefton, admitted defeat.
“There’s a review underway of an allocation for a certain list of electors that needs to be resolved,” he told loyalists who’d paid to be there for the announcement, in a ballroom at a hotel in Markham. We don’t know how long it’s going to take, he said. We’ll tell you who the new leader is “as soon as practically possible.”
Then the coup de grace: “Unfortunately, we do not have access to the hall any longer,” Lefton had to say. “Members, I ask you to please go home to await the results.”
The Tories in the room booed. Just as they’d booed Progressive Conservative caucus chair Lisa Thompson half an hour before, when she went up to stall for time.
The balloons stayed in the net above the ballroom. The bugles stayed unblown. The sacred oils stayed unsmeared on any foreheads. The party hasn’t picked a champion. Ex-MPP Frank Klees called for the party executives to resign.
Voting concluded Friday and the results were so close between veteran Christine Elliott and insurgent Doug Ford that fine technicalities in the counting mattered. Specifically, a technicality that had escaped the leadership-campaign organizers until it suddenly became important: Some of the ballots didn’t indicate which riding the voter lives in.
The party uses a weighted voting system to pick its leader: Each constituency in Ontario is accorded 100 points, divided up according to the percentage of votes each candidate wins there.
If the difference between Elliott and Ford had been thousands of votes, transmogrified into hundreds of points through the riding-by-riding calculator machine, it wouldn’t have mattered. But the difference is not thousands of votes, it’s hundreds — with, it’s rumoured, Elliott ahead slightly in raw votes, Ford ahead slightly in the points calculation that matters under the rules.
(The other two candidates, Tanya Granic Allen and Caroline Mulroney, finished out of the running.)
The free-floating votes have postal codes attached to them, apparently, but some postal codes straddle riding boundaries. They’re not definitive about the voter’s residence.
It’s such a particularly awful mess because Ford, in the last days of the campaign last week, all but accused the party brass of trying to throw the race to Elliott.
It wasn’t subtle: “The leadership vote has been corrupted,” he wrote in an email blast to supporters. “The same group of insiders that oversaw rigged nominations over the past two years has made a two-tier system that favours their hand-picked elites over regular party members.”
A dozen MPPs backed Elliott. Two backed Ford.
The Progressive Conservatives desperately, desperately need unity after this. They said so from the stage, before all the badness went down.
Do not let small differences, which are inevitable in a leadership campaign, distract us, interim leader Vic Fedeli said early in the afternoon, when the train was still on the rails. He immediately repeated it for emphasis.
“Stay together. Stay united. Stay strong. Uniting is not something that simply happens to us. Uniting is something we do,” he said. He was pleased to be handing over the controls to the new leader. Good to go.
The party invited Jason Kenney, the former federal minister and now leader of Alberta’s provincial conservatives, to fire up the crowd. He reminded Ontario Tories what they, and conservatives across the country, agree on: they hate and distrust Premier Kathleen Wynne and the Liberals, they scorn Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (“Prime Minister Dressup,” Kenney called him, and threw in a joke about Trudeau’s gender-neutral language), and they will do anything to fight a carbon tax.
“We need you. All Canadians need you to turn this province around,” Kenney told them.
Maybe this will be a blip. The Tories have ticked up in the polls throughout the leadership race, occasioned by Patrick Brown’s abrupt resignation in a scandal over sexual misconduct. The leadership candidates attacked each other publicly, they stomped on Brown’s memory (and his mercurial decisions to pop into the leadership race and then leave it again). Members complained about the voting system.
The news in provincial politics for more than a month has been about Progressive Conservatives fighting among themselves, and it hasn’t hurt them.
But this party is supposed to be a government in waiting. Whatever the polls show, it’s not looking like one.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
